Foster Misguided on Sex Education

Article excerpt

The nomination of Henry W. Foster Jr. to replace Joycelyn
Elders as surgeon general is another sign that the Clinton
administration has completely failed to understand the message of
the last election. It continues to impose on this country people
and policies rooted in a philosophy that has proved to be an utter
failure.

Foster was less than forthcoming about his views and how many
abortions he has performed. Even Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, a pro-choice
Kansas Republican, said she was disturbed by the misleading
information given to her by the White House concerning Foster.

But there is more to this than misinformation and
disinformation. Foster has close ties to Planned Parenthood, which
has a view of sex and education that has exacerbated, not solved,
one of the major problems our country faces. Planned Parenthood is
not interested in changing sexual behavior but rather in avoiding
the unwanted physical consequences of premature sex. Yet one has to
wonder why it has failed so miserably in achieving that objective.

California may be the best state to judge the results of the
philosophy held by Planned Parenthood and its devotees, who include
the nominee for surgeon general.

Mike Males, a graduate student in the doctoral program of the
School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine,
has studied tabulations from the California Center for Health
Statistics covering 46,500 births among school-age (ages 18 and
younger) adolescents in the state in 1993. In 85 percent of these
births the fathers' ages are identified. The statistics show two
very different types of "teen-age" motherhood.

The first involves peer schoolboy partners, ages 18 and
younger, who average about one year older than their girlfriends.
These are the targets of the Elders-Foster-Planned Parenthood
condom squads and the focus of the chastity vs. condoms war. Boys
in this category accounted for about 13,400 births among
schoolgirls in California in 1993, only 29 percent of the total.

In 33,200 births among California girls ages 11-18 (71 percent
of the total), the father was a post-high-school adult man
averaging over 22 years of age - five years older than the mother,
on average. …